


Maybe This Time...

by EmonyJane



Category: Buffy the Vampire Slayer
Genre: AU, Angst, F/M, M/M, bad language, bad life choices, magic as a drug, screwed up relationship
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-09-10
Updated: 2012-09-10
Packaged: 2017-11-13 23:15:12
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 12,325
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/508772
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/EmonyJane/pseuds/EmonyJane
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>"So? What's up?"</p><p>"Oh, you know, nothing much," Tucker replies, distracted.</p><p>"Nothing much?" Warren replies, rubbing a hand over his eyes, frustration this time. "You call at 5am after, what, eight months, about nothing special." He tries to sound incredulous, surprised, and maybe there's an edge of it in his voice, but really, it can't be a surprise. There's only so many times something can happen and still be a surprise, after all.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

“Hello?”

It’s almost five am when the phone rings and Warren wakes violently at the insistent ringing, confused and half-convinced it’s the ringing of a fire bell at the High School he’s just been dreaming of.

He blinks, staring up at the ceiling for a few seconds as reality reasserts itself – it’s been a long time since high school – and the dream begins to fade.

The phone continues to ring relentlessly until he leans over, clumsy and still half asleep, to pick it up.

“Hello?” It comes out as more of a noise than a word, but there’s enough to get the meaning across.

“Hey,” a voice says on the other end. Warren frowns, confused. Maybe he is still dreaming.

“Huh?” This time it is just a noise, confusion, disbelief, and a tiredness that’s really nothing to do with sleep.

He hears a smile on the other end of the phone, or maybe just imagines one. “How’s it going?”

“What?”

“It’s just a question. Generic kind of greeting. You don’t really have to answer.” There’s noise in the background, singing, laughing, shouting, cars and trucks and who knows what else.

Warren lies back against his pillows and shuts his eyes. “Where are you?” he asks, rubbing the dust from his eyes.

“Vegas, out on the strip. It’s really bright,” Tucker tells him, and Warren can picture him exactly, sitting up on the back of a bench somewhere, surrounded by bright lights, expensive cars, hotels and casinos, all the most colorful people imaginable, smiling, joking, waving as they walk past.

“Still with ..” he lets the sentence fall, not even sure how to describe the group of people Tucker took up with when they were in Tulsa.

“Yeah, we decided to hit Vegas, ya know? Casinos and hotels, it’s been amazing. You should’ve come, man, we’ve had the best time.”

Warren smiles at that. “Yeah, well..” He hadn’t liked them when they’d shown up that first time at the apartment in Tulsa and he was pretty sure he wouldn’t have liked them now, but Tucker had never really understood. “So? What’s up?”

“Oh, you know, nothing much,” Tucker replies, distracted.

“Nothing much?” Warren replies, rubbing a hand over his eyes, frustration this time. “You call at 5am after, what, eight months, about nothing special.” He tries to sound incredulous, surprised, and maybe there’s an edge of it in his voice, but really, it can’t be a surprise. There’s only so many times something can happen and still be a surprise, after all.

“I’m just tired,” Tucker says, quiet and empty and with just enough need that Warren feels his skin prickle. “I’m so tired of them all, Warren. It’s been great and all, but ..” He sighs and Warren shuts his eyes again. “I just .. I’m need to rest. I can’t keep doing this, I can’t, it’s too much.”

Warren lies for a few seconds and listens to him breath down the phone. “What do you need?” he asks eventually.

“Come get me?” Tucker asks, with so little question, so little hope in his voice, Warren knows that Tucker is already sure he’ll come.

He wants to say no, to put his foot down and refuse for once. He wants to say, ‘No. It’s been eight months, I’m happy here, and I don’t need you coming back into my life and turning everything upside down again.’

Instead he sits up and starts looking around the room for clothes.

“Right now?” he asks, trying to sound like he’s not already getting ready to go.

“Please?” Tucker says, knowing he doesn’t really need to. He gives Warren the address, which Warren scribbles down on a tissue.

“If I get there and you’ve changed your mind ..” Warren warns as he pulls his shoes on. “Does it have to be right now, because I could shower, maybe eat, come down when it’s actually daytime ..”

Tucker makes a pained little noise. “I don’t care about that, I need you to come now.”

Warren sighs and runs a hand through his hair before standing and heading out of the door, down the stairs and into the kitchen. “Can I at least have some coffee?”

“Ooh, coffee,” Tucker says, as if he hasn’t had any for months. He probably hasn’t, Warren thinks, surviving on far more dangerous substances and practices. “Bring a flask. Bring two.”

Warren smiles. “Alright, okay. I’ll be there in a few hours. Just .. just go home and get some sleep or something, huh?”

Tucker laughs at that. “Sleep, yeah, okay, I’ll go do that,” he says, as if Warren’s just suggested he fly to Mars or speak to his mom or something else unlikely to the point of the impossible.

Warren shuts his eyes again, this time trying not to picture his friend. “You could go pack your stuff up,” he suggests.

“Oh, it’s already done,” Tucker says, offhand, and Warren knows that once again he’s being taken for granted. It doesn’t surprise him.

“Fine, do whatever you want,” he says, resigned. “Just be there when I arrive, okay? I’m not gonna sit in the car all day waiting for you.”

Tucker gives a little knowing laugh, but doesn’t say it. “Okay. See you soon.”

Warren pours coffee into the two flasks, holding the phone up with his shoulder. “Yeah, okay.”

Tucker hangs up, and Warren drops the phone on the counter. The clatter of noise hurts at this early hour, feeling somehow sharper, and Warren wonders why he’s even doing this. He wouldn’t do it for anyone else on earth. Jonathan called once, stuck in a gas station in Arizona with no car, no clothes and no money.

“I’ve called everyone else,” he said. “Literally, everyone I know. Just .. please, could you call my parents? Or someone? Anyone? You don’t have to come down or anything, just get my folks to call the station ..”

Warren had hung up on him, rolling his eyes, and turned back to the Voyager rerun he was watching.

But Tucker is different. He always has been.

He sighs and heads out into the hallway, pulling his coat on and collecting his keys from the table.

Warren knows how to manipulate people, but Tucker knows how to manipulate Warren, and has no qualms about doing so.

Warren heads out of the door into the cool darkness that falls before dawn and starts planning the quickest route to Vegas.

*

The house they all share is dirty and dark, and not just in the poorly lit sense, aching with danger and games and dark magic, and Warren hopes, as they leave, that he’ll never have to see it again.

Tucker throws his bags carelessly into the trunk and slams it closed, walking round to the driver’s side and holding out his hand for the keys.

Warren raises an eyebrow.

“Aw, come on,” Tucker says, eyes wide and sparking. “You just drove three hours to get here. You’re too tired, let me drive home.”

He’s never seen the place in LA, but it’s already become home. For now, at least.

“I’m fine,” Warren insists, scowling. “Three hours is nothing. I spend three hours getting from one end of the I-10 to the other every day.”

Tucker waves his hand, palm up, over the top of the car. “Come on, keys.”

Warren shakes his head. “What part of no are you having trouble with?”

“Uh, the no part,” Tucker says, waving his hand more insistently. “Just gimme the damn keys or I’ll stay here and find someone else to drive me home.”

“No one else would come all this way to drive you home,” Warren tells him, but he throws the keys roughly across the car into Tucker’s hand and gets into the passenger seat.

“Sure they would,” Tucker says, but they both know it isn’t true.

He pulls out of the parking bay outside the house shakily and casts far more glances to the rearview than Warren is happy with, but once they get away, out onto the Interstate, he calms down and starts talking loudly about all the things that have happened to him in the past eight months.

It’s maybe a half hour after they cross the state line, Tucker in the middle of a long, complicated story about some chick called Judy, that he looks up at the mirror again and pulls off the road.

“.. and she was so out of it, you know? So we’re walking through the hotel lobby and she starts screaming ..”

He doesn’t stop talking until the car is stopped at the side of the road. As the engine cuts off, the radio dies with it, and the only sound left is Tucker un-strapping his safety belt, then the rustle of clothes as he turns, maneuvers, moves across the car.

It’s not easily accomplished, but somehow Tucker manages to reposition himself, cursing as his knee hits the gear shift, so he’s kneeling in Warren’s lap looking down at him. He leans in, shutting his eyes and rubbing their noses together gently, before moving in to kiss Warren, hands running over his chest and gripping at his shirt to keep himself from falling.

“You can’t keep doing this,” Warren tells him as they break apart. “You can’t keep coming back and leaving and coming back and leaving.”

“I swear to god,” Tucker mumbles in his ear, hot and dark. “Warren, I mean it. This time. It's gonna last this time, I swear.”

Warren shuts his eyes. “You always say that,” he points out, but Tucker isn’t paying attention anymore.

“Shh,” he says, placing random little kisses against Warren’s skin. “It’ll be great. I just know it. We can go to Mexico or something, get a house by the beach. Just you and me. It’ll be perfect.”

It never works out that way, Warren knows it from bitter experience, but he finds himself believing it anyway. It sounds so good. Who knows, maybe this time ..

“I missed you,” Tucker says, and Warren opens his eyes and looks up at him for a second before reaching out, pulling him down, kissing him.

“Missed you too,” he mutters, closing his eyes again.

“Good,” Tucker says, sliding his hand down to Warren’s zipper.

*

“So we thought, pizza! And that was .. oh.”

Warren doesn’t stop when Andrew does, doesn’t even pause in making his way back across the living room to the armchair. He sits down and retrieves his bowl of soup from the low, magazine-strewn coffee table where he left it when he got up to answer the door, and settles back into the chair.

Andrew remains hovering just out of range of the sofa. Jonathan peers round from behind him and, spotting the reason for his sudden halt, raises his eyebrows, tightens his grip on the pizza boxes and hugs the DVDs a little closer to his chest.

“What are you doing here?” Andrew says, looking down at the couch.

Tucker looks up from under the comforter Warren’s mom sewed him when he was little, soup spoon halfway between bowl and mouth. “Emigrating to Pakistan,” he says, with almost no pause. “You?”

Andrew crosses his arms over his chest and frowns. Tucker grins up emptily at him and turns back to his soup. Andrew moves his frown on to Warren, who just raises an eyebrow.

“You could’ve said he was here,” Andrew says eventually, accepting defeat and coming round to sit on the other couch. Jonathan takes the sign and follows, putting the boxes down on the table and sitting back awkwardly.

Warren shrugs. “Would’ve spoiled the surprise,” he says, turning back to the TV.

Tucker’s bowl clatters against the table as he puts it down and draws the comforter around himself, shivering slightly. “You brought DVDs?” he asks, peering fuzzily across at the pile in front of Jonathan. “Ugh, pizza.”

Andrew looks a little hurt, but it passes quickly. “Yeah, well, wouldn’t be much of a video night without videos.”

Tucker tilts his head backward to look up at Warren. “Video night?” he says, with mocking warmth.

Warren tips his head to one side. “We don’t all have buzzing social lives,” he says quietly.

Tucker smirks and turns back to his brother. “What did you bring?”

Andrew looks at Jonathan in silent consultation before reaching over to pick up the DVDs. “Star Wars. We thought, you know, we could watch all three in a row. Star Wars-athon.” He and Jonathan grin and nod, and Warren can’t help smiling himself. Some things they just won’t let go of, no matter how old they get and how childish it seems. They’ll be sitting in an old folks home some day, side by side in their rocking chairs, still bitching that Episode 1 isn’t worth watching, even for completeness sake.

Warren’s smile drops a little as he realizes that, even in this momentary silly vision of the future, Tucker is never there.

Tucker does what he can to express his disdain, rolling his eyes slightly and shaking his head. “Could you be any more pathetic?”

“Nobody’s making you stay,” Andrew says sharply, and Tucker shifts slightly and pulls the blanket closer again. He closes his eyes and wrinkles his nose slightly. Warren frowns.

“Uh, maybe we should postpone. I mean, Star Wars isn’t going anywhere. We can watch it next week..” he says, glancing back and forth between Tucker and Andrew as subtly as he can, which is really not terribly subtly at all.

Andrew scowls and battle lines are drawn.

Jonathan looks nervously between everyone else. “Maybe we should,” he says, patting Andrew’s arm. “I mean, if he’s sick..”

“He’s not sick,” Andrew says angrily. “It’s his own fault.”

Warren opens his mouth to defend Tucker, as Jonathan opens his to try and defuse the situation, but it’s Tucker who gets in first, laughing slightly.

“Kid’s got a point,” he says, with a grin up at Warren. “Stick them on, I don’t care. Haven’t seen Star Wars in years.”

Warren knows that isn’t true. They watched it together at least twice when they were in Tulsa, and that was only nine or ten months ago. Of course there’s a chance that Tucker just doesn’t remember back then, or recalls it only as a hazy blur of the real, the unreal, the imagined and the induced.

Andrew nods, peace is declared, and Jonathan breathes a sigh of relief, opening the pizza boxes and taking a slice as Andrew crosses the room and puts the DVD on.

Tucker falls asleep halfway through A New Hope, and doesn’t wake up until the closing credits of Return.

*

“Well, night then.”

They finish watching a little after 2am and head upstairs, hashing out the same comfortable old arguments as they linger in the hallway, passing through from bedrooms to bathroom and back in various states of undress as they all prepare for bed.

Tucker leans against the doorframe of Warren’s room, comforter wrapped around him, and frowns slightly as Andrew follows Jonathan into the spare room.

The door closes and Tucker stares at it for a few seconds before shaking his head and going into Warren’s room, which is, at least for now, their room. Warren pushes himself up from the wall he’s been leaning against and follows.

Tucker’s already in bed, eyes shut and breathing softly by the time Warren enters the dark room. He shuts the door behind him and crosses the room quietly, crawling under the covers on his side of the bed and switching out the lamp that rests on the little table next to him.

“So, they’re, uh ..” Tucker says, nodding lightly towards the spare room.

“Uhuh,” Warren confirms.

“Hm,” Tucker says. Then, after a few seconds silence, “Am I meant to have known that already, or is it new?”

Warren smiles a little. “I think it’s new. I mean, it was new to me when I moved here and got back in touch, so..”

Tucker nods and rolls over onto his back. “I always thought the kid had a thing for you,” he says after a few seconds.

Warren shifts slightly. “Yeah, he did. Does. I don’t know.”

“He could do better,” Tucker says, glancing over at the wall that separates them from Andrew and Jonathan.

“Than me?” Warren looks over at Tucker, raising an eyebrow, but not expecting an immediate denial. Tucker’s just as likely to say yes as no.

Tucker turns and stares at him for a second. “Than Jonathan,” he says, stressing how painfully obvious it is that that was what he meant.

“Oh,” Warren nods. “Yeah, he could. But, ya know.” He shrugs, and shifts over onto his side.

Tucker continues to stare at the wall for a few seconds before turning back to Warren. He almost seems surprised to see Warren facing him, but quickly gets wicked gleam in his eyes.

“C’mere,” he says, not waiting for a response before reaching up to pull Warren into a deep kiss. Warren sighs into his mouth and lets him, knowing that the overly noisy and probably far too energetic for someone in Tucker’s condition sex they’re about to have is almost entirely for Andrew’s benefit. Or lack of same.

There are worse reasons.

*

It’s been almost three months and Warren’s just starting to not wake up every morning expecting to find Tucker gone when he opens the front door and sees her standing on the doorstep.

A girl with wide hips and thick kohl around her eyes, she looks up at Warren, creases her brow for a second, and grins widely and cracks her gum.

“Figures,” she says, reaching up to run a hand through her short, badly dyed, black hair.

Warren looks at her, his heart jumping a little. So, it’s today then. Today. It should feel different.

The girl tilts her head, several earrings jangling together as she moves, and kicks her worn black DMs against the stone of the step. “So?” she asks, eyes never leaving Warren’s. “Can I talk to him?”

“No,” Warren tells her, pushing the door to. “You can fuck off.”

“Hey,” she says sharply, reaching out and giving the door a shove back towards him. “I was only asking out of courtesy. What I meant was, I’m here to talk to Tucker, and if you don’t get out of my way, I’m going to hurt you.”

They glare at each other for a few seconds, until Tucker appears behind Warren and breaks the stalemate.

“Meg?” He grins over Warren’s shoulder at the girl, who’s suddenly all smiles again. “What the fuck are you doing here?”

“Duh,” she says, slipping her fingers through the belt loops on her little red and black tartan skirt. “Came to see you. The guys are all here, they’re waiting in the van.”

Warren almost can’t hear over the white noise rushing through his ears.

“Aw, that’s kinda sweet,” Tucker says with a smile, leaning up against the wall and crossing his arms. “How did you even find me?”

Meg shrugs. “Locator spell.” She looks him over and frowns slightly. “You don’t feel ..” She waves her hand, palm facing towards Tucker. “You don’t feel right.”

Tucker reaches up and runs a hand through his hair nervously. “Yeah, well, that’d be the three months of detoxing.”

Meg looks horrified and glares at Warren. “No, no way! Detox..” She shakes her head. “Dude, for real?”

Tucker nods. “But .. but why?” Meg asks. “When you disappeared, we just figured you’d had a better offer.” She glares at Warren again. “But .. detox?”

Tucker shrugs loosely. “It just .. I needed a break, is all. You seem to be doing just fine on your own.”

Meg stares at him. “That’s not the point,” she says, tilting her head and pouting. “We miss you.”

Tucker looks awkward for a second, crossing his arms again and looking down at the step.

“Yeah, well,” he says, then looks up at her. “You wanna come in? We could .. talk or something, have some food or ..”

Meg laughs. “Yeah, let’s just have a fucking tea party,” she says, smiling.

They watch each other for a few seconds, no one quite knowing what to say, before Meg nods, turns and walks down the step, along the path, and out to the street.

“Come find us when you remember who you are,” she calls back, without looking.

Tucker watches her cross the street and climb into the back of a black van, before turning and heading back into the house.

Warren shuts the door and tries to pretend that everything’s going to be okay now, but he knows it isn’t, and he isn’t surprised when he wakes up three days later and finds Tucker gone.

*

“He’s gone again then?”

Andrew drops down onto the couch far more comfortably than he has in the preceding three months or so, once again treating Warren’s house like his second home. Which it kinda is.

Warren just nods his confirmation, once and slowly, as he sits down in the armchair.

They sit in silence for a few minutes, before Warren gets up and walks into the kitchen. Andrew follows, the way he always follows, and Warren pours them both mugs of coffee. He tells himself that it’s subconscious when he pours Andrew’s coffee into Tucker’s mug.

“When did he go?” Andrew asks, taking the mug without question and putting it down at the pine table as he sits.

“S’morning,” Warren tells him, sitting down opposite and sipping his drink as calmly as he can. “Woke up and he was gone.”

Andrew nods and there’s a few more minutes of silence.

“I knew he was going,” Warren says, unable to stand it anymore. “That Meg bitch came round a few days ago, that was it. He might as well have left the second she appeared on the doorstep.”

“Do you think he’ll come back,” Andrew asks vaguely. He doesn’t really care. Or if he does, he cares that Tucker goes away and stays there. For a second, Warren hates him, as if Tucker’s leaving is all Andrew’s fault for wishing him away. But it doesn’t work like that. There’s only one person to blame, and as much as he tries to, that never works.

Warren shrugs. “Maybe. I don’t know. Not any time soon.”

Andrew runs his finger around the rim of the coffee cup a few times, then slips and dunks his finger. He sucks it dry and stares at it before standing up and moving around the table.

Part of Warren doesn’t expect it, but most of him knows Andrew well enough not to be surprised when he sits down in Warren’s lap and kisses him fiercely.

Warren slips one arm around Andrew’s waist, the other reaching up to his face, pulls him in closer, and goes with it.

Not too much later, sitting on the kitchen floor, wrapped up together and leaning back against the radiator, Warren leans slightly sideways and rests his head against Andrew’s.

“Do you even like him?” he asks as he runs a finger slowly up and down Andrew’s arm.

“Who?” Andrew asks from somewhere near Warren’s shoulder.

“Jonathan,” Warren says.

“Oh.” Andrew considers it for a second. “He’s okay.”

Warren stares across the kitchen at the cupboards and thinks about maybe redecorating. “Why do you stay with him?” he asks.

Andrew’s quiet for a few seconds. “Because you don’t love me,” he says, eventually. Quiet, accepting. This is just how things are.

“Oh.” Warren feels like he ought to give this some consideration, but he doesn’t want to or isn’t ready to or something, so he pushes it to one side. The kitchen floor is cold, and his legs are starting to ache.

“Why does he stay with you?” he asks, flexing his foot and thinking about getting up.

Andrew shrugs and shifts away, reaching over to pick his t-shirt up off the floor and pulling it over his head. “Because,” he says, muffled by the shirt. “Why do you take my stupid brother back every time he rips your heart out and stomps it to little pieces?”

Warren doesn’t have an answer for that. Not one he’s willing to share, anyway, so he puts his own shirt back on and kisses Andrew, who’s now dressed again and kneeling over Warren’s thighs.

“I think I should redecorate the kitchen,” he says as Andrew stands back up and stretches his fingers out. “Maybe green.”

Andrew glances back behind him at the beige cupboards and surfaces, apparently not thrown by the change in conversation. “Green is nice.”

Warren nods. He had the bedroom done after Tucker had left him in Tulsa. Pastel yellows and white. The realtor had said it was a major selling point.

Andrew heads back towards the door into the lounge. Warren follows, catching the back of his jeans and stopping him in the doorway.

“I do like you,” he tells the back of Andrew’s head, one hand still holding the belt loop of Andrew’s jeans, the other resting on his hip.

He lets go and Andrew continues into the living room as if there’s been no interruption at all.

It doesn’t change anything. It never does.

*

“Oh, fuck, not you again.”

Her voice grates, causing the hairs on the back of Warren’s neck to rise, but at the same time his heart jumps at the thought that where she is, Tucker’s bound to be too.

He turns around and regards Meg across the candy aisle of the supermarket. She’s alone, hands on jutting hips, ratty, frayed, light blue jeans with symbols painted on them in black, and a tight, armless, dark blue t-shirt with cotton threads hanging about her waist from its ripped hem. An open, dark-green anorak with large pockets sits uncomfortably over her shoulders, looking desperately like it aches to be thrown it off, freeing her scratched, warm skin again, despite the coolness of the air-conditioned supermarket. The scuffed black DM boots remain, although something’s been painted on the side of the left one with sharp, white correction fluid.

The symbols on her jeans look like standard teen angst Satan worship, which is enough to gain her a few disapproving glances from the ordinary folk going about their everyday shopping. Warren, however, knows enough to know that they’re not. They mean something. He doesn’t like to think what.

Especially that Wite-Out T on her boot.

“What are you doing here?” he asks her, scowling, crossing his arms over his chest, and trying to pretend he isn’t watching the edges of his vision in the hopes that Tucker will appear around the corner of the aisle and saunter over.

Meg shrugs and looks at the candy in the display. “Munchies,” she says.

Warren frowns. “Didn’t think you people ate at all.”

Meg laughs at him, tilting her head and smiling to show off some impressive dental work. “We don’t, except, ya know, sometimes you just crave something so bad you gotta have it. Maybe you thought you could live without it, set yourself up in a nice little life without, but you always want it, and you always go back in the end.”

Warren stares at her as impassively as he can. “You skipped class the day they taught ‘subtle’, huh,” he says.

Meg smiles again and half-turns away from him, towards the candy. “Oh sweetie, I skipped class every day.”

Warren twitches and resists the urge to drive a screwdriver through her brain.

“I meant,” he says, slowly, “what are you doing in LA? Shouldn’t you be .. elsewhere. Far away.”

Meg openly loads her pockets up with brightly colored chocolate bars and sweets with wrappers that crunch and crinkle.

“We haven’t hit LA for a while,” she says, casually. “Figured since we were here picking up our .. lost sheep, we might as well stay. Found a nice little place, met some interesting folks. LA. What’s not to love?”

Warren raises an eyebrow, but the sound of a squeaking shopping cart wheel cuts off any reply as Andrew and Jonathan round the corner of the aisle, arguing lightly but strenuously about which brand of pasta is better.

Warren rolls his eyes and Meg looks at him with something approaching sympathy, which in her case is more like scornful disgust.

“Oh yeah,” she drawls, eyeing the two newcomers. “I can see why you’d hate to give all this up.”

Warren frowns, as Andrew and Jonathan regard the newcomer. They’ve never met Meg before, but Warren can see as Andrew’s takes one look at her that he’s immediately connected her strange clothes and dark symbols with Tucker. Jonathan, on the other hand, seems vaguely hopeful that she’s some friend of Warren’s.

Jonathan realized pretty quickly that Warren and Andrew were sleeping together. Fucking really. Sex, if you want to be kind about it, which Warren isn’t inclined to be. He doesn’t want to know how Andrew thinks of it, but he imagines there are watercolors and rainbows. It isn’t like that, and it never will be.

This strange, Tucker-like girl could be a distraction, though, someone to pull Warren away from Andrew. Warren almost feels sorry for Jonathan. Poor Jonathan, stuck at the bottom of their fucked-up little food chain. He thinks briefly about flirting with Meg to get his hopes up. Of course, that’d mean flirting with Meg, which immediately ends any possibility of that plan going ahead.

Meg blinks a couple of times, just a little too slowly. “Aren’t you going to introduce me to your friends?” she says, smiling with a disturbingly predatorial edge.

“No,” Warren says. “I’m not.”

Meg’s smile drops sharply and she tilts her head, turning her attention first to Jonathan who she sizes up and disregards in an instant, and then to Andrew, who she squints at.

“Familiar,” she says, almost to herself, and Warren feels mildly sick.

“Would be,” comes the not so familiar recently drawl of the magically stoned. Tucker has rounded the corner of the aisle and comes up to stand opposite Meg on the other side, the five of them effectively blocking the entire row. He nods towards Andrew. “He’s my brother.”

“Ooh,” Meg smiles again, shifting her posture to accentuate hips and breasts, pointing one finger loosely from Andrew to Tucker and back again. “That explains it.”

Andrew wraps his arms around himself and looks very uncomfortable at being the subject of so much consideration.

“You done?” Tucker asks Meg, his eyes flicking from her to the shelves behind her and around the aisle with a sickening rapidity.

Meg nods.

“Go wait in the car then, huh?” he says, and she stills instantly, before scowling fiercely.

“Go wait in the car?” she mimics, thrusting her hands into her pockets and dropping her shoulders back down to fight-or-flight posture. “I’m not your mom, you can’t order me around.”

“Go wait in the fucking car,” Tucker tells her again, without malice, and Warren half expects her to fight it, half expects her to burst into tears. Instead she turns, shaking slightly, and walks out of the shop. The alarms don’t go off, and no one stops her. Warren almost envies the dark marks she wears, but decides that shoplifting is meaningless without the risk, and the price is far too great.

Tucker watches the spot where Meg was for a few seconds after she’s left the store before turning slowly to look up at Warren. He grins a broad, vacant smile that Warren hasn’t seen for almost a year. He feels dirty and sick and empty, but his heart still leaps and he can’t stop himself smiling back.

“Tucker,” Andrew starts, but he gets no further.

“Go away,” Tucker says simply, not taking his eyes off Warren.

“But,” Andrew tries again. Tucker turns to him this time, raising his eyebrows.

“Go away,” he says, so calmly it’s frightening.

Andrew looks to Warren for a second, but recognizes even before he does that it’ll get him nowhere. He sighs and turns back to Jonathan and they wheel the cart out of the aisle.

Tucker grins and turns back to Warren. “Fucking my brother now?” he says, but he doesn’t care and it hurts more than it should. “That’s really kinda lame.”

Warren shrugs.

“Least it’s not Jonathan,” Tucker says, crossing the small distance of the aisle to stand in front of Warren, tilting his head this way and that, eyes always moving, left and right, back and forth, as he bounces around his own head. He lifts a hand up, tracing an invisible line in the air in front of Warren’s face. “You’re all shiny.”

Warren looks away and Tucker’s hand drops, resting on Warren’s chest, grounding himself for just a second.

“I miss you,” he says, but it’s empty and Warren’s not even sure Tucker understands what the words mean anymore. “Come with me. With us. They won’t mind. Meg likes you. It’ll be fun. We could have so much fun, Warren, you and me. Like it’s supposed to be.”

Warren doesn’t move. “Meg hates me,” he says after a few seconds. “And she has your name written on her shoes.”

Tucker laughs. “I know. She’s so funny.” He stops, and his fingers tighten around Warren’s shirt. “Please don’t leave me,” he says, quiet, almost pathetic. “I wanna share it all with you. It’s so pretty.”

Warren reaches up and puts his hand over Tucker’s. He wants to move it, push it away, but instead they just lie there together. “You left me,” he reminds him, not sure how to answer the rest.

Tucker considers this for a second, then nods. “Yeah. You’re right. Sorry.” He doesn’t mean it.

He glances back over his shoulder towards the parking lot where Meg is waiting in the car, then turns back to Warren and slips his hands into his coat pockets.

“So,” he says, pausing to give the words appropriate weight. “Wanna fuck in the men’s room?”

Warren pretends to think about it for a second.

“Yeah, okay,” he says, just a little too fast to be convincing.

If Tucker notices it, he doesn’t say anything.

*

The doorbell ringing takes Warren by surprise and he jumps, spilling water out of the little plastic jug all over the window ledge, completely missing the plant he’d been aiming for.

He lets out a few curses as he drops the contained on the now dripping surface, shakes his wet hands, turns and heads through to the hall to answer the door. It’s probably someone selling something, or stupid kids, or maybe a local religious group trying to save his eternal soul from damnation. Warren’s so sick of them. But who else could it be? Andrew comes over sometimes, but he always calls first, even if it’s just from his cell phone while sitting outside the door in his car. Jonathan only ever comes over with Andrew, at pre-arranged times, for pre-arranged DVD watching and pizza eating. And .. that’s it.

For a few seconds, his heart skips slightly and his stomach knots and he hates himself for thinking maybe, just maybe, it might be Tucker.

Then he sees the silhouette through the frosted glass panes in the door.

There is maybe some similarity, if Tucker had been a few inches shorter, slimmer, and a girl.

Warren wrenches the door open and scowls at his guest, or rather his guest’s back, as she is staring out into the street. Warren hears her gum cracking as she turns slowly to face him, grinning widely.

“You gonna let me in or what?” she asks, as if they’re old friends.

“Is this like a multiple choice quiz?” Warren asks, “because if it is, the answer is ‘or what’, and the or what is slam the door in your face.”

Meg pre-empts his action and sticks her foot over the step and into his hallway. “Ooh,” she says, still grinning, and slipping her hands into her pockets. “Déjà vu.”

Warren sighs and leans against the wide edge of the door. The wood scratches his head slightly, and he wonders briefly if he’ll get splinters in his brain.

“What do you want,” he asks her, resigned. She’s just the proverbial bad penny and all that crap.

“I want to talk to you,” she says, her eyes wandering over his hallway, the stairs, the doors into the rest of the house, the pile of shoes and the coats hanging up, the umbrella stand which is full of random crap. She’s taking it all in, but not really seeing it. “It’s important, k?”

Warren looks down at her and wonders if she really thinks he is as stupid as she apparently is. “Oh, well, in that case, please do come in to my home and have free range to steal my stuff and .. whatever it is you’re really here for.”

Meg looks up, tilting her head to one side and squinting as if looking into sunlight. “You don’t like me,” she says, her voice almost sing-song, suggesting that this is somehow something Warren should be ashamed of.

“Oh, no. It’s not that,” he says, correcting her assumption, softly at first. “I really fucking loathe you.”

She smiles even wider, dirty but perfectly aligned teeth and half-chewed gum on full display. “That’s cute,” she says, pulling her hands out of her pockets and resting them behind her back. “I really fucking hate you too.”

It’s not a surprise, not even remotely, but it’s still a bit weird to hear her admit it so brazenly. Not that he didn’t just do exactly the same thing to her, but .. well, that was different. Of course he hates her, she’s completely self-centered and obnoxious. Warren’s not like that. Why would she hate him?

It’s clearly because she’s a bitch.

He glares down at her. “So why the fuck are you here?”

“Because,” she says, a little anger creeping into her otherwise annoyingly light tone. “I need to talk to you about something.”

Warren folds his arms over his chest. “So talk.”

He knows she won’t, be he needs to at least put up the pretense that he’s not going to let her into the house. He isn’t sure if she’ll believe it, but for himself he has to try. There’s only one reason why she’d be here, wanting to talk to him, and it isn’t that she’s selling subscriptions to Reader’s Digest.

The stare each other out for a while, until finally she sighs and looks away. Warren tries not to feel too accomplished. She’s just a stupid girl, after all.

“Inside,” she says, harshly. Then, “please?” in that sweet tone again.

He wants to say ‘no’ and slam the door on her just as a matter of principle – she can’t think that it’s okay to just come over and throw his life into chaos like this – but he knows he can’t. It might really be something important, and he can’t not know.

He steps back from the door and lets her in.

She’s back in her little pleated skirt, red and black, with those stupid signed boots again, which she wipes against the doormat as she steps up and crosses the threshold. She shrugs off her leather jacket, and although Warren doesn’t recognize it, he wonders if maybe it’s Tucker’s. It looks too big to be hers. Maybe he gave it to her. Maybe he stole it for her.

She hangs it up awkwardly, as if it’s been so long since she’s been inside a real house she’s forgotten how everything works.

Warren leads Meg through into the living room, and wonders if he should offer her coffee or something. It just seems so mundane when someone so very abnormal is standing next to his couch, glancing around the room as if she’s never been in a house before, taking in the pictures and plants and piles of work.

Her gaze falls on the TV and she stops and smiles, remembering something maybe. Perhaps they have a TV, perhaps they watch things when they’re high or whatever the right term for it is. Maybe she’s just laughing at him because she thinks TV is lame.

Meg looks down at the couch for a few seconds as if she’s weighing up whether to sit down. She looks wary, which Warren thinks is unfair. It’s a very nice couch.

She chooses not to sit in the end, folding her arms over her chest and looking across the room at him instead.

“Look,” she says.

They stare at each other for a few minutes.

“I’m looking,” Warren says, not bothering to hide his annoyance. “Do you have anything else to add, or is that the important thing you came all the way over here from wherever to tell me?”

Meg rolls her eyes. “No, I .. got distracted. Look, the thing is, I don’t like you.”

“Really?” Warren says sharply, but she cuts him off, raising one hand.

“I don’t like you. And you don’t like me. But, for some reason, Tucker .. He sort of misses you.”

Warren tries not to react, but he’s sure she can just sense the twisting in his gut.

“So?” he says, as disinterestedly as he can. “He knows where I am.”

Meg rolls her eyes. “Boys are so stupid,” she mutters, more to herself than Warren. “Look,” she starts again.

“You keep saying that,” Warren says, angrily.

“Well, maybe you should start looking,” she shouts back, and Warren wonders if maybe he just witnessed a flash of who she would have been if she hadn’t got caught up in all this magic shit.

She walks around the couch until she’s standing next to him. “I don’t care about you. I don’t care if you’re happy or if you cry yourself to sleep every night. In fact, I’d rather it was the latter, because that image makes me smile.” She illustrates the point by grinning for a moment. “But Tucker misses you. And I care about Tucker. Because we need him. He’s one of us, and we look after our own. For some reason that I totally do not get, he wants you in his life.”

Warren’s heart skips another beat, and he wonders, if it skips too many will he just drop dead?

“So what,” he asks her, a little less harshly. “You’re here to yenta us back together with a wave of your magic wand?”

Meg smiles widely and places her hand on his chest. “Kinda,” she says, and the world explodes.


	2. Chapter 2

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Brightly colored flashes of memory hover just outside his reach, familiar locations, familiar people, but it’s like watching a movie – it’s all too Technicolor to possibly be real, and there’s no sound. A rush of air, the feeling of motion, like being flung about on a fairground ride, but people’s mouths move, cars drive past, doors open and close, and no sound is made. Just the rushing air and a buzzing undertone.

When Warren wakes up, seconds minutes hours days weeks later, his whole body aches, his feet are dirty and sore, he’s wearing a long, black coat he’s pretty sure didn’t used to be his, and he remembers only Meg’s dirty teeth and the soft, dizzying pull of unconsciousness.

He isn’t surprised to find her long gone when he opens his eyes, and it takes a few seconds before Warren recognizes his own bedroom. Warm morning light pours in through the open curtains, not the hazy afternoon sun he left, and silence beats at his shattered mind until he pulls himself upright and runs to the bathroom to throw up.

He lies against the cool white tiles of the bathroom floor, shifting slightly this way and that in a vain attempt to find a comfortable position, and pulls a damp towel down off the rail to throw over his pounding head as he tries to recall something, anything from the darkness between Meg and morning.

Brightly colored flashes of memory hover just outside his reach, familiar locations, familiar people, but it’s like watching a movie – it’s all too Technicolor to possibly be real, and there’s no sound. A rush of air, the feeling of motion, like being flung about on a fairground ride, but people’s mouths move, cars drive past, doors open and close, and no sound is made. Just the rushing air and a buzzing undertone.

He’s not even sure what day it is, and he wonders idly if he went in to work while he was .. what, tripping? Who the fuck knows what the right language is for whatever Meg did to him. Whatever it was, he’s pretty sure his boss wouldn’t appreciate it.

His fingernails are tinged with black, like the remains of scratched off nail polish, and as the world grows clearer and perhaps just a little softer, Warren starts to feel a different kind of ache. It starts in his shoulders, for some reason he doesn’t really know, a gentle pressure that at first he simply attributes to lying on the floor and everything.

Later, as he crawls down the hallway and into bed, cursing Meg, women, and all forms of magic, he wonders if maybe he did something crazy while he was out of it, like getting a huge tattoo across his back or paragliding or something else shoulder-straining. But the ache has started to move, both up and down, and while the ache in his head has become a just-beyond-reach tingle, there’s a feeling of vast emptiness in his gut that he tries not to think about too much.

After a night of restless sleep which involves more staring at the ceiling than actual sleeping, Warren stumbles downstairs and discovers, by checking the date on his computer, that it is Tuesday. Meg was at the house on Saturday, and Warren decides he’s probably fairly lucky he got away with only losing two days of his life to her.

His inbox is full of email, which he flicks through far more slowly than usual, stopping to read twice the one from his boss demanding to know where the fuck he is. He calls work, tells a blatantly see-through lie about how he’s been really sick all weekend with some horrible gastric thing, which he describes in so much detail the poor secretary doesn’t ask any questions, and crawls back to bed for the rest of the day.

*

The ache is still there. If anything it’s got worse, and Warren can’t pretend he doesn’t know what it is. Magic fucks you up, it gets inside your head, inside your body, under your skin and deeper in than it’s even possible to measure, and it does stuff to you, changes you. It’s not quite so addictive that you get hooked by just looking at it, but it’s not far off. One little taste, like the one Meg gave him – forced, not gave, forced – and you feel it for weeks, months, who knows.

Warren’s not so experienced with this stuff that he can really tell. It always feels worse when it’s happening to you, and he tries to tell himself it’s psychological and shit, but that doesn’t stop him waking up in the night shivering, shaking, and planning a way to get a hit before he’s even fully conscious.

He finds himself wondering, in idle moments sat behind his desk, when spider solitaire just isn’t doing it, how Tucker managed. He’s been into the stuff since he was, what, fifteen? Okay, it hadn’t got so heavy until he hooked up with Meg and her crowd in Tulsa, but it had been in his system for years and years, and he’d still managed to detox. Okay, not forever, but that was Meg’s fault.

No it wasn’t, a traitorous little voice whispers. He was never going to stick around, not forever, and you know it.

At this point, Warren’s hands start to itch and he has to hide in the bathroom, sitting on the stall floor, fists clenched as his arms wrap around his knees, waiting for the shaking to subside.

He refuses to let himself look for them. The plans, the thoughts, the pain, Warren pushes it all down and will not let it break him. This is Meg’s fault, he tells himself several hundred times a day. I won’t let that bitch win.

When he gets out of his car one morning, at least two weeks from The Day, he decides that it’s his victory. After all, it’s not like he went to her.

They regard each other across the parking lot, Meg sitting on the low, brick wall outside Warren’s office building, kicking her heals back against and scuffing her boots with red dust as Warren stands by his car and fights the violent urge to stride over and push her backwards into the bushes.

She smiles, toothy and perhaps attempting flirtatious, which Warren finds slightly repellant, and cracks her gum loudly. One of the small group entering the building, a large, middle-aged woman from Human Resources who smells faintly of sour perfume and gets drunk at every office party, looks over at Meg, scandalized that someone so dirty and obviously up to no good would be anywhere near her prim, proper life. Warren feels a surge of hatred for his workplace and everyone in it that he hasn’t felt in years.

He gives up and crosses the parking lot.

Meg doesn’t wait. As soon as he moves, she does, echoing his progress as they leave the grounds, walk down the street, cross the park. Moving through the city like this, on foot, Warren usually watches people. He thinks it’s probably a left over reaction to high school, watching everyone so that you see them before they see you, judging them, testing them, who’s a threat and who’s safe, who to avoid, who to move closer to, and who to run in the opposite direction from. The city’s the same, but on a grander scale. In high school it was jocks and locker room beatings. In the city it’s muggers and murderers. Sometimes Warren thinks that maybe high school was better training for the real world than he ever realized at the time.

On this day, though, his entire focus is on Meg. He watches her back, the casual sway of her hips, the shushing of her pants, the clunk of messy steps in heavy boots, and the slight bounce as her fried, deadened black hair absorbs the motion of her body. He could catch her up, it wouldn’t take more than a dozen steps, but he knows, somehow, that that would just break the spell. Something is going on here, and going against the pattern is not the way to get what he wants.

They move through the city for what could be minutes or hours, Warren closes down his mind, reciting electrical formulae, periodic table, TNG episode names, whatever it takes to fill the empty space where the questions might appear if they have the chance.

He’s halfway through Babylon Five, season 3, when Meg stops at a house. They’re in a disarmingly suburban neighborhood, filled with SUVs and nicely trimmed, but toy-strewn front lawns, and Warren almost misses her change of direction completely.

“Hey, genius,” she calls, and he looks up, caught off guard by the noise, which breaks through the gentle rustle of leaves on the trees like a chainsaw. “Over here.”

Warren blinks and tries to think of something witty to say in reply, but Meg’s already turned away, knocking sedately on the door.

The house looks a lot like all the others on the street. The van Warren saw before must be in the garage, and the car from the supermarket is parked in the drive. It doesn’t look horribly out of place here, and Warren feels a bit cheated by it all, until the door opens and a wash of dark magic flows out, so strong even he feels it.

Tucker is on the other side of the door, eyes wide and slow as he blinks against the light. He squints at Warren for a second. “What?”

Meg smiles and reaches back to catch hold of Warren’s shirt, tugging it gently. “He followed me home. Can I keep him? Huh? Can I?”

She grins widely and kicks the step softly with the toe of her boot as Tucker stares at Warren.

“I don’t get it,” he says, eventually, slow and careful like he’s not quite sure the words are the right ones for what he means to say.

Warren shrugs. “Me neither,” he says, and it’s like taking a step back from his own body. Watching someone else going through it all. Giving over any control he ever had over himself, giving in.

Meg smiles to herself, neither of the boys is looking her way, and pulls Warren into the house, closing the door behind them.

*

Warren is lying against the ceiling, staring down at himself lying in Tucker’s arms on a dirty mattress in a room that was a kitchen once. A few empty cabinets line two of the walls, and an old pine chair, lined with damp, sits in one corner.

Tucker is sitting upright, leaning back against the stained wall and stroking Warren’s hair. His lips are moving, and Warren thinks he might be whispering something – a spell maybe, or perhaps something more personal. He can’t hear it, whatever it is, but up here, on the ceiling, it doesn’t bother him. Nothing bothers him up here.

The whole room is under a blanket of absolute silent, like a little oasis of bloody death in the middle of a rioting crowd. He hears the commotion outside though. All the sounds of the house whisper through his ears, as loud as screams. Painful and violent and desperate.

The door swings sharply open and Tucker looks up slowly. The dancing, swirling creatures that live in the walls swim casually around the room, going from wall to wall to wall, ducking and diving to avoid the quick, snapping obstacles before them, and electricity, black and shining, flickers and crackles between Tucker’s fingers.

His eyes are completely black, and Warren wishes he could fly down there and swallow him whole.

Andrew halts in the doorway, staring down at his brother and Warren. Warren on the ceiling smiles, but Warren on the floor stays utterly still.

Jonathan hovers just over Andrew’s shoulder, the way he always does, and Andrew slowly steps into the room.

Their mouths move - Andrew’s is fast, snappy and as furious as he can be with the brother he’s still mostly just afraid of, Tucker’s slow and considered as words form under the influence of the powerful magic he’s tapped in to right now. Warren can’t hear the words, but he feels them trickling through his blood as they pass through Tucker’s mind. That’s how it works, this thing they do. It’s all about being connected.

Meg appears in the doorway, making Jonathan jump and shuffle quickly off to one side, out of harms way like a tiny mouse fleeing a python. She stretches an arm up against the door frame and looks up at Warren on the ceiling. He waves down at her and she smiles.

Then there’s a pull, something akin to how Warren imagines it might feel to be sucked down a drain, and an overwhelming dizziness that makes him clench his eyes tight shut. When he opens them again, he’s looking up at Andrew, Jonathan and Meg, and he can feel Tucker pressed up against him.

“See?” Warren hears Tucker saying with a kind of casual arrogance as Warren curls over to one side to throw up. “He’s fine.”

He hears Andrew cough out his disbelief at this statement, and wonders what the kid’s problem is. Then he wonders when he started thinking of Andrew as ‘the kid’, which has always been Tucker’s term for his brother. ‘It’s a deep connection,’ one of them thinks, and the other agrees, although neither can say which was which.

“You.. just, just let him. We’ll take him home and everything will be okay,” Andrew says, his voice slightly shaky.

Tucker laughs as Warren pulls himself back up to a sitting position. “Let it go, kid. He doesn’t want to leave, and you can’t make him.”

One of the wall-demons hovers just above Andrew’s head, posing to strike. Warren thinks Meg or Tucker must be controlling them, for it to be poised just there just now.

Andrew moves, crossing the room to kneel down by Warren’s side, and the demon melts back into the plasterwork.

“Warren?” he says, quietly, as if it’ll stop anyone else from hearing them. “Warren, I want you to come home.”

Warren smiles and reaches up tentatively, not sure his arm’s still working, to pat Andrew’s face. “Give up, kid,” he says, surprised by how much stronger his voice sounds than he feels. “You don’t always get what you want.”

Andrew stands, sudden and unnaturally sharp in a place like this, and walks out of the room. Warren watches him go, watches Jonathan’s little flinch of surprise, watches Meg cross the room and curl up next to Tucker.

He pulls himself to his feet and pushes past Jonathan, out into the little hallway where Andrew is leaning against the wall, arms wrapped around himself.

He walks slowly, step by step, until he can reach out and rest a hand against Andrew’s back. Then another, and he traces the lines and swirls that only he can see, smiling to himself as they move and radiate.

“It won’t last,” Andrew says, after some indeterminate amount of time that could be days. “He’ll leave again.”

“They’ll leave,” Warren agrees, “and I’ll go with them.”

“No.” Andrew turns now, facing Warren and watching him so intently he feels honor-bound to pay just as much attention right back to Andrew. “He’ll leave, Tucker. He doesn’t leave because they leave, they leave because he leaves, and he leaves because of you, to get away from you. You know that. You must know that.”

Warren blinks. “No,” he says, looking away, and the dark lines that criss-cross the bare floorboards begin to fade back into the wood. “No, that’s not..”

“Look,” Andrew reaches out and puts a hand on Warren’s chest. “I wouldn’t lie to you, would I.”

Warren looks up at him for a few seconds before shaking his head. Andrew doesn’t lie, Andrew’s not like that. Andrew’s the good one. Well, mostly.

“So, it’s,” Andrew looks around the dirty hallway, drawing his words together. “It’s just delaying the inevitable, you know? Putting it off, but it’s still going to happen.”

Warren nods sadly. Can’t argue with that. Tucker’s always left before, and he knows this time won’t really be any different.

Andrew tugs on Warren’s shirt a little, clenched in his fist, and Warren finds himself leaning in and resting his head against Andrew’s shoulder.

The taste of magic is still strong in his skin, and Warren isn’t sure if he’s thinking at his most or his least clear, but it all seems to make perfect, desolate sense.

“So you’ll come home,” Andrew says, not quite a question, in a tone he must have learned from his brother.

Warren shuts his eyes and nods against Andrew’s shoulder.

*

Months of sleeping in Andrew and Jonathan’s guest room melt into one big blur that Warren labels “recovery period” and immediately discounts whenever he has reason to think about it.

Andrew is at his best when he has something definite to do, and Jonathan is miserable and passive. It’s painful and impossible and there’s a gaping, hollow space inside that Warren knows will never ever be filled. It’s only the knowledge that whatever he tried, even if he went back to them, it still wouldn’t be enough that gives him the strength to keep going. That and being locked in the house for two screaming, swearing, crying months of torture.

But it’s over now, done, and he’s not going back. He’s finally back in his own house, working again, and there are at least two hours each day when he doesn’t think about Tucker, Meg and their little magical crack den.

No matter how hard he scrubs, a grey stain remains, embedded in his fingernails, and the scars from where Tucker decided to carve his name into Warren’s arm are as vivid as the day he did it.

Meg’s sitting on the hood of his car one morning, examining her own fingernails and shivering in the heat of the summer morning.

Warren’s not surprised to see her, and briefly considers just getting in the car and driving off with her still sat there.

“We’re going,” she says without preamble as he reaches the car door.

“So?” Warren says, running through prime numbers and the element table to distract himself from the pull she exerts on him now.

“So,” she says, looking up and smiling. “Circus is leaving town, kitten, and you’re not invited.”

Warren blinks. “Uh, good?” he says, turning back to the car and shaking his head. “It was great, really, but you need to learn to move on.”

“Oh, we have,” she says softly, almost dreamily, and Warren hates her more than ever. “I just..”

Meg pauses and slides off the hood onto the sidewalk. She looks serious for once, and Warren wonders if she’s always looked so tired and he just hasn’t noticed before.

“He misses you,” she says, quiet and not at all like the woman Warren has come to know.

“Is this where you tell me that we have a pure and beautiful love, and to meet you by the railway tracks at midnight for a daring, last second rescue? ‘Cause, I’ve got to say, I’m a little busy tonight,” Warren says, rushing through the words and trying not to think too hard about what Meg actually said.

“No,” she says, reaching up to pat his face. “This is where I tell you that if you ever come near Tucker again, I’ll snap your neck.”

Warren’s silent for a second. There’s something in her eyes, a dark desperation that he recognizes, that says she’ll do it. “And if he comes near me?” he asks, eventually.

Meg smiles. “Same applies.”

Warren shakes his head. “If you don’t want us together, why the whole,” he waves his hand back toward the house. “That thing? With the magic? Why not just leave back then?”

Meg shrugs, not as casually as she wants to, and Warren wonders if maybe he just knows her better and can see these breaks in the façade now, or if maybe they’ve fallen apart too and are still trying to put themselves back together. “He needed to work through it, get you out of his system. Now you’re out.”

“If I’m so out,” Warren says, “why are you here threatening me?”

Meg scowls. “He always left us, left us and went running back to you.”

Warren holds up a hand. “No, he always left me and went running back to you.”

“Whatever,” Meg says, disregarding him. “He wanted us, and, God knows why, he wanted you, and at the back of his mind he always thought he could have both. Now, he knows he can’t, and he had to choose.” She smiles broadly. “And you lost.”

“Whatever,” Warren says eventually, breaking the moment and turning back to his car. “I have to go to work. Some of us have actual lives, you know.” He doesn’t believe her for a second. Maybe Tucker thinks he’s chosen, but even Meg can’t fool herself into thinking this is it. If she had, she wouldn’t be here.

“I mean it,” she says, a new lightness creeping into her voice. “Come near him again and I’ll kill you.” She gives a little laugh before turning and walking away. “See you,” she calls, and a little chill runs down Warren’s spine that doesn’t shift until well past lunchtime.

*

Andrew thinks he’s won, and Warren wonders, not for the first time, just how much of this is simply a battle for attention between siblings with him playing substitute parent. But that introduces a whole new level of disturbing, and Warren’s life doesn’t need any more of those.

Months pass and life settles down to the staid, dull routine it always adopts between the brief periods of fury. It’s like the quiet between aftershocks, although that would make the first time - their first meeting maybe, or the first kiss, he’s not sure – an earthquake, and that only makes Warren laugh.

More often than not Andrew sleeps at Warren’s, and while his eyes have taken on the sheen of cat-adoption and white picket fences, Jonathan looks permanently miserable. Warren shuts his eyes and tries not to think of anything at all.

The call comes as Warren sits at the wide oak desk in his always too cool, air conditioned office, his cell phone vibrating violently against the wood like a giant silver beetle having some kind of seizure. He knows from the number that it’s a dirty payphone somewhere, and there’s never any doubt that he’ll pick it up, listen, feign disinterest, and then travel halfway across the country and back, but he tries to picture it for a few seconds as the cell starts to chirrup its distress.

There might be a second call in a day or two, then a third, and then it’d be over. He’d settle down, forget it all, maybe go for coffee with the pretty girl who always smiled at him over the copy machine. They’d get married, have some kids and a dog. Andrew would cry himself to sleep every night, and one of the children would have Tucker as a middle name, although the copy girl would never, ever know why.

But then a tiny gasp of fear catches in his throat, and Warren grabs up the phone to answer it before it stops ringing. The vision disappears, and Warren thinks it’s probably best for the kids anyway, because he knows what growing up in a dysfunctional family can do to a person and he doesn’t see why he should inflict that on anyone else if he doesn’t have to.

The call comes from New Jersey, and Warren leaves a note on his boss’ desk to say he’s been called away and he’ll be back in a couple of days.

*

“No.”

It’s such a quiet word, Warren almost feels a slight stirring of sympathy for the kid. Almost.

“You, you’re supposed to be gone,” Andrew says, rigid and damp-eyed. “You weren’t going to come back this time.”

“What,” Tucker looks up from the couch, “you thought you’d won, kid?” His hair is longer now, like some kind of Jared Leto mid-90s retro thing, and it swings like a stupid shampoo commercial as he shakes his head and smiles a smile that makes Warren’s heart skip. “You could never win this one. You know that.”

Not long out of the shower, where he stands for hours, scrubbing at the blackness under his fingernails that just won’t shift, he slips his feet up under the hem of the robe – Warren’s, dark blue, a present from his mom, he thinks – and turns his attention back to some TV show about a group of women in bikinis living on a island.

Andrew just stands and stares, not quite knowing what to say. Warren wonders for a second how he might be feeling right now, but he’s never been very good at that kind of thing, so he decides to just ignore Andrew until he goes away.

He glances back as he hears them leave, and Jonathan is smiling just a little as he follows Andrew out of the house.

“Was that too much?” Tucker asks vaguely, with just enough sincerity that Warren suspects he might actually care. “I mean, was it too mean? He is just a kid.”

“He’s twenty-six, I think he can take it,” Warren says, unsure of the direction of the conversation. It doesn’t normally go this way, and Andrew’s wellbeing is never at the forefront of Tucker’s thoughts.

But then, he has been different this time. He reads the newspaper now and then, and spends a lot of time staring out of the window, into the garden, thinking. He even watered the plants once – with actual water. Warren had pinched himself to make sure he wasn’t hallucinating.

Warren knows that everything that happened to him over the last few months, the last year really, since he went and picked Tucker up from Vegas – it changed him. He sees things differently now, his life, his work, Andrew and Jonathan and everything that surrounds him. There was some kind of link, some kind of bond between Tucker and him, and he thinks maybe part of Tucker leaked into him, corrupted his system and left him questioning everything he’d taken for granted before. Maybe, he thinks, as he watches Tucker rubbing his hands together and picking at the loose fluff on the robe, maybe it changed him too.

Tucker smiles. “Do you remember that plan I had?” he asks, pulling his hands up into the sleeves of the robe and wrapping his arms around himself. “We should do that.”

Warren frowns slightly. “What plan?”

Tucker looks a little hurt that he doesn’t remember. “Mexico, dude,” he says. “We should go there. You and me, somewhere they can’t find us.” Warren isn’t sure if he means Andrew and Jonathan, or Meg and her friends. He isn’t sure if Tucker is sure either.

“I think they could probably find us in Mexico,” he says, slowly. “It’s not even that far away.”

“There are places though,” Tucker tells him, gazing darkly off into the ether. “Places so dark you can’t see anything. Or be seen by anything.”

Warren doesn’t know what to say, and the silence stretches until Tucker turns and looks at him, tilts his head, smiles, breaks the moment.

“Isn’t that what you wanted?” he asks, and Warren feels a tiny shiver inside. “We could disappear, slip off the radar for a couple of years, a couple of months even.” There’s just the lightest touch of desperation, and Warren can’t help but admit it’s an attractive plan.

“It’d never work out,” he says, breaking eye contact and looking back to the TV. “It.. It just wouldn’t.”

Tucker stretches out and one foot appears from underneath the robe. “Don’t you want to at least try?”

Warren stares blankly at the screen, trying to picture how things might be. It doesn’t seem possible. Tucker’s always promising things like this, and they never work out, or more usually they never even get started. However Warren pictures it, it always ends with Tucker leaving, or Meg showing up at the door one day and slitting his throat.

Recently-scrubbed fingernails brush lightly over his arm, and Warren looks over slowly, reaching down to catch Tucker’s hand in his own.

“You’re sure they won’t find us?” he says, although he knows full well that Tucker will tell him whatever he has to to get Warren to agree to his plan.

Tucker nods, utterly certain. “Absolutely. They’re a bunch of powerless wannabe losers without me anyway.”

Warren can’t help but smile at that. “And no magic?”

Tucker rolls his eyes. “Right, no magic, of course. So? Are we going to Mexico? Should I start packing?”

“You don’t own anything,” Warren points out. “All ‘your’ stuff is mine.”

“Still got to be packed,” Tucker says, matter-of-factly.

Warren looks around his living room, at the books and computers and plants and random pieces of paper from work. None of it means anything. None of it’s worth anything. When did I stop living, he thinks to himself. When did I die?

Tucker flicks him on the arm. “Hey, don’t zone on me, man,” he says. “I need an answer. I need confirmation. Confirm me!”

Warren blinks. “Sure,” he says. There are a million reasons why it’s a stupid plan in the first place, and another million why it will never work out. It won’t be the first time they’ve tried it, disappearing into the wilderness where “no-one” can find them. They’re always found. Or failing that, Tucker always gets itchy feet – itchy hands, itchy eyes, just itchy – and one day he’s gone and Warren’s stuck out in the middle of Bumfuck, Nowhere. All his cash and cards are missing, clothes shredded in an addict’s pre-high frenzy, car or truck or whatever it was gone, or at least broken beyond repair. Last time Tucker had taken out the tyres. Warren isn’t sure why. He thinks maybe it’s an instinct; he doesn’t want to be followed and stopped, so he leaves Warren stranded and powerless. Sometimes he thinks it’s because Tucker wants to pretend that if Warren is stuck there, he’s got someone to come back to when he’s got that one little hit he needs to feel good again.

Whatever it is that happens to ruin things, they always get ruined somehow. Life’s not a song, and you don’t always get what you want.

But then, if Tucker’s pattern of using him and leaving is that predictable, Warren’s pattern of taking it like a bitch is written in stone. “Why the fuck not,” he says, finally. “Let’s go.”

Tucker looks surprised for a few seconds, which Warren thinks is stupid really because he always agrees to whatever Tucker suggests, then punches the air. “Yes, Mexico! When?”

Warren shrugs, “Right now?”

Again, Tucker looks surprised, eyebrows raised and slightly suspicious. “You sure?”

Warren smiles. “Not much of a disappearance if we wait around to say goodbye, and leave a forwarding address,” he says.

Tucker stares for a second, then grins widely and stands up, leaning down and kissing Warren soundly. “This is why I like being with you,” he says, before turning and padding upstairs silently to throw things into a bag.

The room is suddenly flat and empty, meaningless without Tucker to lend it context. Colors seep and run until everything stares back at Warren in watery shades of black, white and grey. There’s no life, no depth, and Warren feels nothing but absence.

Whatever happens in Mexico, however long it takes for Tucker to leave him, or however long it takes Meg to find them and slit his throat once and for all, it’s worth it. Even if it wasn’t, he’d still go. He can’t not.


End file.
